Inner Circle Update for December 10 2018! (Patreon)

Hey guys!

So, not a whooole lot of visuals to show off this week as we’ve been focused on some technical stuff, prepping 3D assets, and breaking down artwork for animating in Spine. What I do have is pretty fun though. Below you’ll find an updated build of the game that contains some new entries in the H artwork concept gallery :D. Limbo has been working on sketches that illustrate the progression of H events. Keep in mind the game content is the same still (aside from a new graphical glitch, heh).

Pure Onyx Test Build 

First Boss Battle Setting!

The scene at the top of the post is our concept for Pure Onyx’s first stage boss battle with the big wrench-axe Splicer guy (I’ll think of a real name soon x_x). Limbo prepared a set of variations which we will borrow elements from, since our 3D version will likely have some differences. 

Stage 1-1 Map Progress

Ubercharge and I have worked some on the backgrounds for the street map (here’s a rough mock-up :D), but we needed to get schooled some on Mr. Kittyhawk’s parallax system in Unity so that we don’t have to hassle him with testing parallax speeds, etc. on every map. 

Ubercharge has also been developing the right side of the map, where we are adding the entrance to a highway underpass. Here’s a rough WIP in the game cam view, before we add the distortion transform to the geometry to give it the classic beat-em-up perspective (it should look really cool based on our test).  This segment will transition to Stage 1-2.

Stage 1-2 Map Concept

I tried to show we can be a little more comfortable with the wacky perspective here by making a design that transitions between indoor and outdoor scenes. The background will consist of a few parallax layers, and yup, that’s the wreckage of our favorite giant robot :o. 

I’m planning for a total of five maps in the first stage. It will look something like this: Streets > Underpass > Police Roadblock / Boulevard > Industrial Park > Warehouse. 

Backgrounds Will be a Lot Sharper Now

We spent a full day troubleshooting quality issues with the backdrops. Turns out Unity was downscaling our textures to 8096 px, which resulted in really blurry backgrounds (here’s the difference, shown with a character sprite to make it really obvious). This is happening in the demo stage as well, so you may have noticed Onyx’s character sprite being overly sharp against the blurry background. To resolve it we will need to break the backgrounds down into chunks in-game.

Hold on to Your Assets >_<

TK’s been digging his way through the mountain of assets we scored during Black Friday weekend. I’ve been trying to give him some insight into what to tackle first.  So far, he has this fancy warehouse scene dolled up and ready to be torn down for use in the boss setting shown above. He’s also finished with a bunch of destroyed vehicles and rubble piles, which will work perfectly in some of the remaining maps for the first level. All of this stuff will go great in MATM as well :D.

Animation Progress

I’ve been teaching Kitsune my process for breaking down the artwork for Spine while maintaining nondestructive workflow. It takes longer, but this will allow us to further develop the artwork later if we so choose with soft shading or normal maps for lighting, without having to remake our meshes for animation in Spine.

As mentioned at the top, Limbo’s been working on H artwork concepts for the Splicer minions. He’ll be developing sketches for the progression of the scenes, which we can turn into frame animations and eventually into keyframes which we will use for Spine animations. With a little elbow grease, we will have our first high quality H artwork that we can experiment with pretty soon :D.